Researchers create low-energy, 1,000-core processor
If you were wowed by Intel's recently released 10-core desktop processor, you'll likely appreciate the efforts of a team of researchers at the University of California, who created what they claim to be the first 1,000-core processor.
Officially unveiled at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16, the KiloCore chip contains 621 million transistors and maxes out at 1.78 trillion instructions per second.
"To the best of our knowledge, it is the world's first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university," team leader Bevan Baas said in a statement.
You May Also Like
The KiloCore is different from traditional multi-core processors in several ways. First, each of its cores is independently clocked, meaning it can shut itself down when not needed to save energy. Also, the chip can execute 115 billion instructions per second while only using 0.7W of power, making it extremely efficient -- 100 times more so, researchers claim, than a modern laptop processor.
The 32nm chip, which was manufactured by IBM, is not something you'll see in your desktop PC any time soon. Instead, it's aimed for professional use, with some of the applications being encryption, video processing, wireless coding and decoding and datacenter record processing.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
